Last of Autumn Leaves — Leaf Rubbings, an easy Craft Project

The end of November in London means those glorious Autumnal ochre and reds are fading to brown. Yesterday, our local park had more leaves on the ground than on the trees, so I wanted to capture the season in crafts, before Winter winds blow all the bold colours away.

Leaf rubbings are so easy to do, perfect for toddlers or after school entertainment, requiring little help from parents, and super simple… utilising materials you have at home. In fact, this was completely unplanned and just sort of happened. And now we have beautiful leaf rubbing cards to send to our American friends and family for Thanksgiving.

We made this project into a few steps, stretching it out so we had fun things to do after nursery school for a few days. First, we enjoyed exploring outdoors on one of the sunny days when there were brilliant colours everywhere. On our walk Beatrice enthusiastically collected different shape leaves, which I have also loved doing since I was a little girl! At home we learned more about our nature finds within the pages of this beautiful and fascinating book (it was a gift and is wonderful for all nature lovers!). Next, we brushed off any bits of dirt from the leaves with a dry paintbrush (surprisingly this step is essential: little flecks of debris cause problems later when you do the rubbings, creating holes in the paper, so please dust it off).

Then we pressed the leaves overnight in between paper towels using the same (heavy) book as a weight to flatten the leaves.

For the rubbings, our materials included : washi tape (so it doesn’t tear the corners of the paper), a glue stick, a few Autumnal coloured crayons (we love these Bavarian Gnome ones –cute!), and regular thin white copy paper.

To make the leaf rubbings, you make a ‘sandwich’, placing the leaves in the middle of two sheets of paper, using washi tape to keep it in place while you rub away with crayons in one direction back and forth. It is fun to see the faces on the little ones when the leaf reveals itself! Like magic.

We decided the rubbings were pretty, but the paper seemed a bit flimsy, so taking it one step further, I cut out the leaf rubbings to make things a bit more finished, and considered. We glued the rubbings to some red paper, although I wish we had some thicker paper stock in a deep chestnut brown, but we were resourceful and used what we had on hand. (I always use oil cloth to cover the table since it is easy to clean up from.) The finishing touch for us was to make cards for Thanksgiving. Inside we wrote one or two reasons we were thankful for our recipient, and then sent them off to our pen pals.

Equally, this craft would look great framed on a wall.  What we enjoyed most was spending time together walking in the crisp Autumn air, collecting the prettiest leaves while crunching thru the dry leaves, and creating this little craft as an ode to autumn. A moment to stop and treasure the season.

Enjoy,

Lara  xx

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